When most people think of Kansas they think of corn, and justifiably so: Just over 10 percent of the state was planted in corn last year.

But that’s not how Americans thought of the territory during the first half of the 19th century. To them, it was an infertile desert. After all, there were few trees, little water, and miles of quietly rustling prairie grass grazed by thousands of buffalo. The ground was usually hard and dry, and the entire state was infested by prairie dogs — which are cute but obnoxious if you’re a farmer. (READ MORE: Reality Bites the Left)

Kansas — like much of the Great Plains — was purchased from France in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Territory. Oddly enough, that territory wasn’t immediately divided into states to be admitted into the union, which makes sense when you consider the fact that very few individuals lived in Kansas permanently. Of course, at the time, it wasn’t Kansas. It was part of the Missouri Territory. But that ended in 1821 when Missouri became a state and split off from Kansas.

Kansas likely would have continued to be a barren wasteland and a happy home to prairie dogs if it weren’t for John Deere. In 1837, Deere had enough of the traditional wooden plows. The soil in Illinois was so rich that it would break his wooden farming tools. So he made a plow out of steel.

Suddenly, Kansas wasn’t a wasteland — it was miles of flat opportunity to be had for the price of John Deere’s plow. Pioneer Americans were career opportunists, and they were quick to take advantage of the miles of potential farmland they just had to wrestle into submission. (READ MORE: Nikki Haley Passes the History Test)

They were governed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act (established just before Missouri joined the union), which laid out a path for statehood for both territories. By the 1850s, there were enough pioneers in the territory to justify making it a state.

There was, however, a huge problem. The economic and social influences that contributed to the Civil War were just months from turning into America’s deadliest conflict. Congress was carefully balancing slave states and free states as it admitted new territory, hoping to avoid a conflict — but the Kansas-Nebraska Act said that Kansas could make its own decision by popular vote.

That wouldn’t have been a problem necessarily, except that Missouri was a slave state. When the voting began, Missourians snuck across the border to cast votes and sway the election — in fact, enough of them snuck over the border that they were able to flip the state. When Kansas pioneers noticed, they decided to repeat the election.

The result was two mirror governments in two mirroring capitols that each drew up a constitution and an application for statehood and then sent those applications to Congress. But this was no mere battle of words, it quickly devolved into a bloody conflict. Both sides murdered, killed, and burned down neighboring towns, earning the state the title “Bleeding Kansas.” At one point, one of Kansas’s governments authorized its troops to burn down the capitol of the other government. (READ MORE from Aubrey Gulick: The Birth of a New Science)

Eventually, enough slave owners fled to Missouri to influence the final election that made Kansas a free state in the union. On January 29, 1861, it joined the union. Unfortunately, Kansas turned out to be just a prelude. In August, the civil war broke out.

This article originally appeared on Aubrey’s Substack, Pilgrim’s Way, on Jan. 29, 2024.